Deactivate Installed Plugins in WordPress

Deactivate Installed Plugins in WordPress

There are two methods to disabling your plugins. One requires you to use FTP and the other requires you to use phpMyAdmin.

Deactivate All Plugins Using FTP

In this method, you will need to use either a FTP client, or your host’s file manager.

First, you need to connect to your website using a FTP client, or File Manager in cPanel server. Once connected, you need to navigate to the ‘wp-content’ folder.

Inside wp-content folder, you will see a folder called plugins. This is where WordPress stores all plugins installed on your website.

Right click on the plugins folder and select Rename. Change the name of the plugins folder to anything that you like. In our example, we will call it “plugins.deactivate”. Once you do this, all of your plugins will be deactivated.

Usually, this method is used when you are locked out of your admin area. If the issue was with your plugins, then you should be able to login to your WordPress admin area.

Deactivate all plugins using phpMyAdmin

The FTP method is definitely easier in our opinion, however, you can also deactivate all plugins using phpMyAdmin.

First, you will need to login to your web hosting dashboard. In this example, we are showing you a cPanel dashboard. Your hosting account’s dashboard may look different.

You will need to click on phpMyAdmin icon under the ‘Databases’ section.

This will launch phpMyAdmin in a new browser window. You will need to select your WordPress database if it is not already selected. After that, you will be able to see WordPress database tables.

As you can see that all tables in the database have wp_ prefix before the table name. Your tables may have a different prefix.

You need to click on the wp_options table. Inside wp_options table, you will see rows of different options. You will need to find the option ‘active_plugins’ and then click on the ‘Edit’ Link next to it.

On the next screen, you will need to change the option_value field to a:0:{}and then click on Go button to save your changes.

That’s all, you have successfully deactivated all WordPress plugins using phpMyAdmin. If it was a plugin stopping you from accessing WordPress admin area, then you should be able to login now.

We hope that this article helped you deactivate all plugins in WordPress.

My name is Linda, I have Master degree in Information Technology Engineering. I have some experiences in working with Windows and Linux VPS and I have been working for 2 years on Virtualization and Hosting.